Artificial Heart
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: Sequel to The Gate. Heart's freeze. Blood's spilt. Faith broken. The board is completely redealt. There's a war they have to win and worlds to save, but first, they must beat themselves. And with death lurking in shadow and spirits snuffed, the end is far


…

_**ARTIFICIAL HEART**_

…

_**Prologue**_

_**The Circle of Life**_

…

The pen moved fluidly, carving out the almost flawless shape as though the hand holding it was well practiced in the art. He was. Markedly more than the average person in any case. They used compasses to draw circles, curves, but he managed well enough with no instrumental help.

_The circle. Symbol of completion. Wholeness. Unity._

Another circle was drawn, outside the first. The centre points, if one used a compass to check, overlapped perfectly. Too perfectly, really, to be hand-drawn, but there was no denying it. His other hand was holding the sheet of paper in place, and it wasn't a particularly remarkable pen by any account. Its ink was running out too. In a few days it would be nestled amongst food scraps, packages and who knew what else went into the rubbish bin. It wasn't like he kept a record of it. After all, the tool of record-keeping was the one being disposed.

_An outer circle. Self-contained, where the beginning and the end met in at a unified point_. _The flow of the entire universe. The barrier, the containment…_

In the space between the two circles, he drew a far smaller circle with a horizontal line through it. Three different circles now nestled in close proximity to one another in the page, and all of them had different meanings. It was the line that stretched across, splitting the perfect curved shape into two semi-circles, the bases touching. The circle was so small that if he had drawn the other two a little smaller, it could have been the size of a grain of salt.

It was remarkable how important salt, such tiny little crystals in physical appearance, could be. Chemically speaking, they were a network lattice of sodium and chloride ions, but their numerous functions: food preservatives, purification processes…

_Salt. The base matter. Solid._

He drew another symbol between the two borders. The female symbol, the one that cropped up quite often in genetic textbooks especially, only that symbol lacked an almost half-circle worn on the head like a hat or a crown. The planetary symbol of mercury.

_Mercury. The fluid connection. Liquid._

Between them, on the side where the distance stretched to twice that of the shorter side, he drew a third symbol. A triangle with a cross whose tip touched the base.

_Sulphur. The fiery spirit. Gas_.

Then he drew a triangle within the inner circle, linking the three together.

He looked at the image a moment longer, trying to make sense of it. He realised after a little thought that those three symbols now at one of the vertices of his triangle represented each of the three phases of chemical matter: solid, liquid and gas. Moreover, in a more symbolic sense they represented the body, the anchor and the spirit. Or as people called it, the essence…or the soul. But that wasn't strictly true, as mercury symbolised the soul far better than sulphur did.

In that case, the spirit and the soul were two complete different entities.

They were explicitly stated as different entities within religious scriptures. It was mistranslation (of a sort) in the earlier versions that had led to the belief that they were the same. The spirit was the immaterial part of man. Man was _not_ a spirit. He simply possessed spirit. On the other hand. Man _have _a soul. It is that soul that defines them, makes them, pushes them…theoretically anchored them to life. Once separated, a person "died".

He leaned back a moment, deliberating on that. He supposed it made some degree of sense. Water, the sea…many a person described it as living, with a will of its own. The waves churning, spitting out seaweed and dead eggs and the occasional fish while ensuring other things that made its way onto her surface within her net. It was said even that the sea was relentless, unforgiving. Perhaps it was, but the water only continued to flow as it always did, following forces humans little understood and animals simply learnt to adapt to. Mercury was, in its natural state, a liquid. Moreover, it represented the woman, as implied by her symbol. He wasn't sure of the origin or syntax of the word, but the possibility it was feminine was quite high. Just as the sea was feminine. Just as the moon, the yin symbol, was feminine.

Those three substances, together, were called the trinity of alchemic substances. Alchemy he knew was the precursor to chemistry, but it seemed many had taken it on a tangential road to something that would be better known to the rest of the world as magic.

Magic seemed closer when one was thinking about the soul. However, if one chose to thinking of even the most inorganic forms of matter as possessing _spirit_, thus containing a form of energy (it was almost like ignoring all the restrictions that stopped, for example, carbon forming into diamond instantaneously) that made transformation possible. Between those three substances: salt, mercury and sulphur, they covered not only basic states of matter, but law of natural creation and change. Sulphur came about due to the action of fire on air, mercury by the air upon water, and salt by the water upon earth. The four powers of nature united the three elements.

He drew a square, its vertices passing the restraints of the triangle but not quite touching the edge of the inner circle. At each point, he drew a triangle. The one nearest to salt had its point facing downward, with a horizontal line cutting it through the bottom half. The one between salt and mercury had no such line, but its peak likewise faced down. Between mercury and sulphur he drew a triangle with its peak facing up, a horizontal line cutting through its upper half, and on sulphur's other side, a similar triangle with no line permeating its closed shape.

In order, they were earth, water, air and fire. The four basic elements of nature.

He frowned at that point, trying to remember what else there had been. He remembered lots of similar circles, each with different assortments of circles, triangles, squares, line and symbols, including runes he still hadn't found the meaning of, but slowly, very slowly, they were all coming together.

Ever since that day, he had been trying to make sense of all the knowledge that had suddenly popped into his head. At first he had brushed it off as a nightmare. From the shock of almost dying, it hadn't seemed wholly unbelievable…until he suddenly found himself a medical spectacle. Within the space of two minutes, his heart had somehow gone from not beating to non-existent, and he had gone from dead to alive. The specialist had marvelled over how his blood vessels and other components had managed to rearrange themselves into a temporary pumping mechanism, but had estimated such a mechanism would likely hold for a few weeks at the most. That had just been enough time to organise a transplant of a mechanical heart (through lots of grapes and vines he wasn't even aware of; some parts of it had to do with him being a walking medical miracle and thus nudged up on the priority list and others to do with his father). He felt guilty about that still; many people died waiting for the transplant that could save their lives, but less than he would have if it had been another's heart. An actual heart really. The mechanical heart was still a prototype, even after decades of research, but as apart from that problem he had come out as perfectly healthy, he turned out to be a good candidate.

The fact that it came with several…oddities was, in its own odd way, both comforting and bitter. It was made from aluminium and some plastic structures, and initially had left a very vile feeling in his chest. He'd been throwing up repeatedly, as if there was something slimy in his gut, twisting and churning and aching to get out. Eventually, he became used to the rubbery coldness and it became warmer as his internal body heat was conducted through the metal. Once his body balanced out, it largely accepted its new operational heart, but he still sometimes felt the cold gripping, the icy steel that felt nothing like a viable heart, the organ that had carried his life and love and much else. Apart from the recharges needed every ten to twelve hours (the exact time depended on his required cardiac output), his body had pretty much gotten used to having a hunk of metal and plastic instead of a beating muscle.

His mind was another ball-park entirely. He found himself seeing things differently. He found himself avoiding company because he'd never felt more alone. His mother still worked long hours. His father, brother and stepmother were four hours away and no telephone conversation could make up physical contact. Takuya, Izumi, Junpei and Tomoki were the same. He'd only seen them four times since he'd gotten out of the hospital, and it had been one and a half years. And he found some things he had used to enjoy doing completely unbearable; he had consequently essentially attacked what was left with a new frenzy. Obsessively almost. It was a wonder there were still books left for him to read, words and symbols and languages still left to learn. His old journals lay buried under the desk, collecting dust along with sketches of creations: new lands, new characters, new stories. They were all unbearable now, haunted by constant reminders of an old shadow, counting the days till it descended upon him…

He deliberated over the shape he had drawn a moment, before penning in a pentagon encompassing both sets of circles. The single vertex at the top took the astrological symbol that represented touch, while those on either side of sulphur took those of smell and taste, leaving those on either side of mercury to take sight and sound.

He then added a hexagram encompassing the five-point star, and at each of its tips the symbols he drew one of the seven chakra. The crown at the head, then the third eye, the throat, the solar plexus, the sacral and the base/root. Around the six-point star he drew another circle to encompass it, and then a lotus flower with twelve petals to finish off the seventh chakra, the heart.

He'd had to look that up as well. Never had he come across the human body described that way, but after he'd read through the Indian philosophy he had found examples cropping up almost everywhere. But the heart lay in the centre, the most complex and the most important of all.

The cold gripped him then, but he ignored it except for rubbing almost absentmindedly at the shirt material over his chest, picking up his pen again to draw two more circles, their centre points overlapping the first two he had drawn but far bigger, far more encompassing. The outer circle was the final one, and the inner one was less than a centimetre in-between. Together, the array took up almost the entire space of an A3 paper. And with a few lines, a few words in the triangles of the hexagram an ancient phrase running between the heart chakra and the inner circle: "from the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides". It was another circle, but a circle of words.

In the very centre, above and below the centre point of the four circles which carried two canals between them, were two Chinese characters and a larger character overlapping them both. Obscuring them. Above was life, below death. And combining them both, a word which could be translated as many things, but perhaps in context meant heaven. Or void.

He had drawn many copies of the array before, each time seeing something new, understanding something a little more. It was a wasted effort. He knew it. After all, what good were a bunch of circles and symbols he had seen once and somehow committed to memory, but it was something he found he couldn't leave alone. The silence, the emptiness, they always brought it back.

He added a few lines and curves, and finally it reflected the image glaring in his mind. Then he set down his pen.

But it was still missing something. Something that held the answer to everything. The missing piece in the puzzle.

His heart continued to beat with a gradually slowing: _lub-dub, lub-dub_.

_**End of Prologue**_

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **Well, here's the sequel to The Gate_._I would have gotten it up earlier, but the amount of research required was crazy, and I've started university.

Bill Schroeder became the second recipient of an artificial heart in 1984 and lived 620 days, which is the longest anyone on a total artificial heart as apparently survived. They're making a new prototype, but that won't be out in a long time (bless than 15 years now though apparently) and the Frontier digital world took place in the year 2001 in Japanese and 2002 in English, based on that source I found somewhere which said the twins' birthdates were June 29, 1993. There was another place, but I doubt its right because it says Kouji's birthday is March 10 and Kouichi's February 9. How does that work when they're twins?

Anyway, the artificial heart is called the Jarvik-7, and consists of aluminium and plastic structures replacing the lower two chambers of the heart and using two rubber diaphragms for the pumping action. An external compressor kept the heart beating. Back in the day it was about the size of a refrigerator. There's a new one though that's a portable and we'll put a battery because you can't pump 24/7.

And hearts apparently carry more than just the function to pump blood around the body. The details will be explored throughout this fic, hence the title really.

I researched the meanings behind the transmutations (and that took a long time so you guys better appreciate the effort, and feel free to pitch in with any ideas/knowledge you have) because the explanations become important to people who don't have a clue about alchemy, aka. the frontier characters. I'm trying to stick to ones that pop up in the series, but I might add others, and if I do, I'll explain my reasoning and exert fanfic author privileges on it. Cool?

For Digimon fans on that note who aren't too familiar with FMA, the Gate basically shoves a whole lot of alchemic knowledge into your brain and takes a payment as toll. But having knowledge in your head isn't the be all and end all. You have to understand and be able to both recall and apply it. It's not something you forget easily, but it's still something you have to delve further into, organise and theorise about. It's like having the formula and needing to know how to apply them in different contexts. I mean, if someone gave you a formula sheet, you could memorise the stuff on there but could you actually use them if you didn't know how they worked in context? Similar stuff, but Kouichi's been doing some research since that fateful day because all us humans hate being ignorant and it's been driving him up the wall. On that note, what I have found is pretty confusing. Eg. There are multiple symbols for soul transfer and they all appear to have the same function. I don't think it matters all too much as long as you cover all the basics.

This particular array is a different version of the human transmutation circle the Elrics used. Note Izumi had used one that looked rather different. This one goes from the single Japanese character for life to the three elements of earth: salt, sulphur and mercury, to the four elements of nature: earth, water, fire and air, to the five senses: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste, then the seven chakra, the seventh (the heart) being the hexagram itself. Then the two outer rings which represent the flow of energy,, ie. the conduit, but there is a thick membrane in between and there's writing between that and the lotus petals. The second double circle, the one around the triangle and circle, refer to different energy flows, the physical energy. The outer set refers to spiritual energy. The more intricate parts of the circle are not described, but that's the basic idea. In the world of FMA, this could be the version using the alkhestry from Xing. I've used the basic alchemy circle based on the Wu-Xing, but that pops up later.

On that note, for those of you who _are_ familiar with FMA, this crosses over aspects of the two animes. The part in the frontier real world is based off the 2003 anime, and … you know what, I'll tell you guys when the 2009 anime pops up. It'll be awhile before the Fullmetal Alchemist world shows up though. Don't know how long. On that note it might even be next chapter. Haven't exactly planned the chapters out yet past the beginning of the next one. I was going to scrap the prologue idea again, but this just doesn't work put it with the first chapter, so separate it goes.

And on _that _note, if you want another update, you're going to have to ask for it. I've got some fics pretty clawed in and about ready to put the speeder on, so they're no.1 priority once I'm through with all the half-finished stuff.


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